Robot 6

Everyone’s A Critic: A round-up of comic book reviews and thinkpieces

• Dan Nadel offers a devastating — and as far as I can tell, the only — negative review of Darywn Cooke’s The Hunter (which, by the way, has gone back for a second printing already). Lemme quote a bit here:

Even if I’m wrong and Cooke’s reading is utterly faithful, this adaptation doesn’t work very well as a comic book. Cooke’s character design is strangely generic, his storytelling is often unclear, and his drawing, while polished and stylish, is dull. Parker looks like a generic sort of Bruce Wayne, with a face and body language that betrays not a hint of an inner-life. Panel-to-panel and particularly page-to-page Cooke has a difficult time clearly conveying where a scene is occurring and what, precisely, the action and emotions are that he’s trying to draw.

He goes on to use John Stanley as a point of comparison, which befuddles some folks in the comments section.

• Julia Keller of the Chicago Tribune really liked Tim Hamilton’s adaptation of Fahrenheit 451, to the point where she offered this pithy paragraph:

Some of my anti-comics correspondents claim that reading a graphic novel is not really “reading” at all. They’re right. It’s something else again. In the case of “Fahrenheit 451,” it’s more like a life-changing immersion in ideas, words, echoes, symbols, characters, lines, colors, nightmares — and finally, daybreak.

Now don’t get crazy Julia.

• Nina Stone finally catches up with the Buffy comics: “As of now, after this read, I don’t have any interest to read it again.”

• Over at Savage Critics, Sean Collins contemplates Squadron Supreme while Jog muses on some recent examples of superhero decadence.

• The site Paddy Brown is doing a look at the history of Irish comics, which you should go read because knowledge, no matter how esoteric, is good for you.

• Todd Klein reads the latest volume in the Complete Peanuts saga and exclaims “Top notch book. You can’t have a much better time than reading these collections.”

• Noah Berlatsky has apparently jumped on the “let’s do quick scattershot reviews of new comic books in a snarky way.” Welcome to the club Noah.

Simon DelMonte

I haven’t read the Parker GN yet, but having read a lot of the Parker novels – the first three in the series, and all of the ones that Stark/Westlake did since reviving the character 10 years ago – I can say that Parker doesn’t have much of a inner life. Indeed, that’s sort of the point of the first book. He is all about cold revenge in the first couple of books, and then all about making a dishonest living after that. He has no depth whatsoever. Which works in the context of a series about heists and thieves. There are characters in the series who do have inner lives, and they play off Parker quite well. But I think that anyone who’s a fan of these books reads them for the inner Parker.